(Revised and ready for review)

Technology and the Literary Society

-- By YuShi - 17 Dec 2009

"I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

-Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008.

The Problem

I stumbled across Carr's article while flipping nonchalantly through an old copy of The Atlantic a few weeks ago. The catchy name of the piece jumped out at me, but it was Carr's story about his diminished attention span that soon caught my attention. His anecdote might as well have described me. A voracious reader all throughout middle and high school, I have not read a full novel for leisure in a few years. The last book I attempted to read, Anna Karenina, I barely got past the midway point of the novel before giving up for good. It is not that I no longer have the time or the passion for reading - it remains an ardor of mine and I still read a decent amount during winter and summer breaks - but my reading habits have changed. Like Carr, I have a short attention span while reading and my mind frequently wanders, no matter how interesting the text. The days of my sitting down with a Bronte or Austen and reading for both content and style seem so long ago; nowadays I find myself perusing mostly short stories and magazine articles, things that I can begin and finish in a short amount of time. I resort to poetry to satiate my craving for style and eloquence.

Are Our Reading Habits Changing? Some Stats and Studies

A study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) offers some quantitative indications of people's changing reading habits. The most glaring finding is that Americans are simply reading less now than they did before; for example, the percentage of 18-24 year olds who read at least one book that was not required by school or work fell from fifty-nine percent in 1992 to fifty-two percent in 2002. While there is no proof of a causal relationship, this seven-percent drop coincides with the rise of the internet.

But you wanted the data from the preceding period to show whether that was continuous with an already downward trend (in which case no causal hypothesis is necessary). You didn't look. In fact, of course, reading for pleasure among people 18-24 has been dropping pretty steadily for the last fifty years. Perhaps television?

Moreover, studies suggest that even when people do read, they are probably not reading as closely as they once did. The NEA report claims that in 2004, fifty-eight percent of middle and high school students surveyed admitted to using some other form of media while reading.

Television, again.

The Carr article also references an interesting and revealing study conducted by researchers at University College London. In tracking visitor activities to two websites that provide journal articles and e-books, the UCL researchers discovered that people frequently read only one or two pages of a book before switching to another one, and rarely do they ever return to the book they were reading. Hence in the researchers’ opinion, the internet seems to have given rise to a kind of reading where people “power browse” instead of sitting down and reading a book in the way that the activity is traditionally understood to mean.

Actually, that's the activity called "research."

These studies seem to corroborate the unfortunate changes that I am observing in myself.

Doubtless. We are not disputing at the moment that something is making you stupid; we'll take that on your statement. The question is whether "the Internet" is responsible. I mentioned at the beginning of the course that "the Internet" is not a thing. Careful avoidance of that reification would have allowed you not to fall into Carr's hole. "The Internet" is the social condition of pervasive interconnection. Is that resulting in your increased stupidity, that you're better connected to more people with fewer intermediaries? Or just that, despite your love of reading, you make poor use of your mental equipment, having trained neither your powers of memory nor your powers of concentration?

If we gave everyone on Earth a free hammer, there would be more pounded thumbs, right? Until people learned how to use hammers better. Conclusion?

What to make of these changes?

Ultimately, I decided that – at least for myself – while my literary habits have certainly changed, the changes have not necessarily been for the worse. I have a much better eye for picking up information quickly, and am better at separating what is important in a piece of writing from what is there primarily for ornamental purposes. Additionally, my changing reading habits seem to also have influenced the way I write; I am more focused on content and less driven by style. I also write faster than I used to, as I no longer force myself to painstakingly think through each sentence to make it as nice-sounding as possible.

Last time you said that carelessness made it possible for you to write better. Now you are limiting yourself to the idea that carelessness allows you to write faster. This is probably true, but it's hard to see how, for someone intending to be a lawyer, this is progress.

Given the profession that I am about to enter into, these changes are not altogether bad ones.

Because being a lawyer is about writing rapidly without taking pains?

What does this mean for society at large, though? While these changes in reading habits might suit the legal profession in certain ways, their impact on society poses different but intriguing questions. If people are not reading as deeply as before, and are increasingly focusing on content instead of style, will we lose eloquence as a result? Or will eloquence be redefined? If people’s reduced attention spans are preventing them from enjoying full novels, then will novels continue to be the bedrock of literature? Or will novellas and essays shape our literary future? I do believe we will see a shift in our literary habits, but I feel that it will be a change that reflects people’s needs and preferences. Technology will not bring the end of literature, but will simply reshape literature into something that resonates with tomorrow’s society – and that might means novels with shorter chapters or a proliferation of short stories like never before. More dramatically, maybe magazines will be the new novel. In any case, I do not believe that technology is making us less literary, because being “literary” is a fluid concept whose definition changes as society changes, and what form it ultimately takes is a fascinating question that might not be answered until well after our lifetime.

You did indeed try to find data in support of Carr's idiotic theory. But you got one study result, which you didn't put in any context, making it pretty much useless, and another which really added nothing because the supposed data produced was not liable to meaningful interpretation. In both cases you satisfied yourself with the headline searched out by Google, without looking at or analyzing any actual results for yourself. You did not refer to any psychology or cognitive science about attention, concentration, or the nature of reading.

It is true that contemporary young adults read less, and with more difficulty. Undergraduate teachers of literature will tell you, if you inquire, that reading loads in, say, an "English Novel" offering have typically declined by an order of magnitude over the careers of people retiring now: where one major 19th century novel a week was assigned in such sophomore survey courses when I was a child, one or two major novels a term is now the most that can be expected of most students.

In my experience, undergraduates know precisely why that has happened: they weren't trained to read as children, and they really don't know how. "We should have been forced to sit in a room and read when we were kids, and we're really mad at our parents and teachers who didn't make us, because now we realize what we've been deprived of," say University of California undergraduates in course evaluations I read all the time.

What primarily prevented them from learning how to read was television, a force you do not discuss. As for yourself, you are, as I pointed out the first time, in law school, which has had a bad effect on people's ability to read extensively outside the law since before Edward Coke. "If you wanted to read James Joyce you came to the wrong place," said the then-dean of Yale Law School, Harry Hillel Wellington, at orientation on the day I arrived in September 1980. If he knew about the Internet that morning he was a lot smarter than anything he did in his entire lifetime demonstrated.

The real point of this essay is that you want to believe Carr. My question isn't whether his absurd proposition is right, which it most certainly isn't, but why you're so drawn to it. Perhaps you should try another draft that approaches the question from that angle: why do you want to believe that what's happening to your mental life is being caused by "the Internet"?